Businesses need customers. People commuting by train like small shops they can stop at on the way home to buy food and sundries, or sundaes, as the case may be.

What is important for any community is an open and transparent conversation, and Sara and Jared sat through several real insults to portray the honest facts about possible densities near Mt. Baker Station.

Housing plus jobs plus the flexibility of mass transit sounds like a better idea…to me. How about you tes arbols, dan, justin?

I’m sorry you did not have time to work in the ways you wanted to, but, the other ways are a little nebulous to the rest of us. Some better PR in those communities with the immediate impact would have helped. Getting out to groups, events and people in those neighborhoods could have helped avoid a lot of grumbling.

It seems if you could get glowing reviews and strong support from the first neighborhoods and cities and the organizations in them it would put you on stronger footings for those areas effected later.

Quickly. No where have I supported the status quo. My point is that your language does not help your cause. People in the SE have built a community and do not want to see their hard work dismissed and destroyed. The process you all have taken did not respect the hard work people have already put into this neighborhood. These changes are seen as opportunistic to many people in the SE even though they have strong potential to add to the community.

The Mayor has begun the process of revising and updating those neighborhood plans, with the direction of adding the goal of climate protection. I expect the communities who participate in the process to be as informed and thoughtful as we were ten years ago.

I believe that HB 1490’s claim to target global warming to be disingenuous. We all agree that density may help, and we all agree that transit oriented development will help. In the past ten years, density has appeared in the designated Urban Villages and Urban Hubs, and by some measures it has exceeded the City’s goal to comply with the targets of the State’s Growth Management Act.

We are also all concerned with the preservation of affordable housing, and this is not something Seattle is good at. We’re ready to try incentive zoning, because we’ve been told that a developer won’t build affordable housing without being compensated with the opportunity to build more profitable housing as well. I would argue that depending upon the private sector to solve our affordable housing needs is inefficient and indicative of our collective reluctance to take on the task ourselves, with a well-funded public sector effort.

HB 1490 uses “inclusive” zoning. In this case, the incentive is not made directly to individual developers, but rather to the community of developers. In exchange for a new mandate to build affordable housing, zoning changes will allow developers to build more, and more densely, and at greater reward to themselves.

As evidence of developers’ interests, note that the state commission that developed HB1490 included developers and realtors (though in an advisory and non-voting capacity) and did not include local Seattle community members who have already demonstrated their ability to write neighborhood plans that accommodate density.

I’m also concerned with the mechanisms the bill establishes for setting rents. Please note that there isn’t a square-foot for square-foot balance: A renter can be given a $500 per month apartment, but as I understand it , the bill leaves it up to the developer to decide how big the apartment is and its level of amenity.

But I’ll stop here. I work with private, non-profit developers who are building affordable housing, and I need to go the office.

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/02/11/them_s_fighting_words#BlogComments-comment-1098753

I’ll save you time; here’s the conclusion:
“I guess what it comes down to is that Fox has totally given up on us ever being able to create enough new very low-income housing to meet the need, so he just focuses on what we’ve got left. That might work for a while… but it’s just not sustainable. Thankfully, mainstream affordable housing groups are working toward that goal. While they’re willing to admit that they can’t do it themselves, they’re pushing hard to enlist for-profits by having the City create incentives for them. (It’s long and it’s slow and people get angry seeing developers incentivized to create what looks like expensive “affordable” housing, but it’s the right fight.)”

549 units per acre.

Just saying.